TY - JOUR
T1 - Following the story
T2 - narrative mapping as a mobile method for tracking and interrogating spatial narratives
AU - Hanna, Stephen P.
AU - Carter, Perry L.
AU - Potter, Amy E.
AU - Bright, Candace Forbes
AU - Alderman, Derek A.
AU - Modlin, E. Arnold
AU - Butler, David L.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by National Science Foundation (Award #1359780) The authors wish to thank our student research assistants for their help in data collection and analysis as well as the owners and staff of the plantation museums in this study.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2019/1/2
Y1 - 2019/1/2
N2 - Museums and heritage tourism sites are highly curated places of memory work whose function is the assembling and ordering of space and narrative to contour visitors’ experiences of the past. Variations in such experiences within and between sites, however, necessitates a method that: (1) captures how guides, visitors, and exhibits interact within spaces when representing and performing history and (2) allows researchers to document those variations. We developed narrative mapping, a mobile and geographically sensitive form of participant observation, to enable museum scholars and professionals to systematically capture, visualize, and interpret tendencies and variations in the content, affective qualities, and spatial arrangements of museum narratives over multiple sites and across multiple tours at the same site. Two antebellum plantation museum case studies, Laura Plantation in Louisiana and Virginia’s Berkeley Plantation, demonstrate the method’s utility in documenting how stories are spatially configured and materially enlivened in order to analyze the ways enslaved persons are placed within these narratives.
AB - Museums and heritage tourism sites are highly curated places of memory work whose function is the assembling and ordering of space and narrative to contour visitors’ experiences of the past. Variations in such experiences within and between sites, however, necessitates a method that: (1) captures how guides, visitors, and exhibits interact within spaces when representing and performing history and (2) allows researchers to document those variations. We developed narrative mapping, a mobile and geographically sensitive form of participant observation, to enable museum scholars and professionals to systematically capture, visualize, and interpret tendencies and variations in the content, affective qualities, and spatial arrangements of museum narratives over multiple sites and across multiple tours at the same site. Two antebellum plantation museum case studies, Laura Plantation in Louisiana and Virginia’s Berkeley Plantation, demonstrate the method’s utility in documenting how stories are spatially configured and materially enlivened in order to analyze the ways enslaved persons are placed within these narratives.
KW - Museums
KW - mobile methodologies
KW - slavery
KW - spatial narratives
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85046024779&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/1743873X.2018.1459628
DO - 10.1080/1743873X.2018.1459628
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85046024779
VL - 14
SP - 49
EP - 66
JO - Journal of Heritage Tourism
JF - Journal of Heritage Tourism
SN - 1743-873X
IS - 1
ER -